SMALL GEMS; A Traveler Lured Beyond The Brand-Name Galleries

ON a recent trip to Atlanta, I set aside time for a visit to the city's best known art institution, the High Museum of Art, only to decide that the special exhibitions did not intrigue me. Having gone to the museum nearly every visit in the past, I queried a friend for names of the city's smaller art collections.

''You mean you've never been to the Michael Carlos Museum?'' she asked. ''You should really see it.''

My cousins, who are also Atlanta residents, were not familiar with the museum, nor were some business associates.

Still, the Michael C. Carlos Museum, on the Emory University campus, turned out to be wonderful, filled with stunning Greek and Roman artifacts and an Egyptian collection.

That visit prompted a search for other lesser-known museums, particularly in cities where brand-name institutions are far more familiar to travelers and even to most residents. Each of them provided a sense of discovery and the opportunity to see art in the relative tranquillity that larger, busier institutions often lack.

Some of these museums prosper with grants from private donations. For example, Michael C. Carlos, an Atlanta wine and spirits wholesaler of Greek origin, gave $20 million to the Emory University Museum over a 20-year period; the money was to be used to expand its collection of Greek art. The museum was renamed in Mr. Carlos's honor in 1993 when he financed an addition designed by the architect Michael Graves.

But there are also museums created by collectors who want to keep their collections intact by establishing a museum to house them. A friend who collects rare books told me about a museum in Philadelphia, established by the Rosenbachs, brothers who dealt in books and decorative objects and left their home and jewel-like collection of 4,000 rare books to the public.

Nationwide, there are hundreds of such museums devoted to specific interests. Two guides are ''America's Art Museums: A Traveler's Guide to Great Collections Large and Small'' by Suzanne Loebl, and ''Little Museums: Over 1,000 Small (and Not-So-Small) American Showplaces,'' by Lynne Arany and Archie Hobson.

This museum has been eagerly adding to a stunning collection of Roman and Greek pieces. Today its 16,000 objects include Egyptian, South American and African art.

The sources of the acquisitions are diverse. In 1999, for example, when the Niagara Falls Museum was liquidating, the Carlos museum bought 10 mummies, 9 coffins and other artifacts for $2 million. Part of the financing was raised from Atlanta residents after a newspaper article said the museum did not have enough money for the purchase.

Later research determined that one mummy may be Ramses I, the only Egyptian pharaoh whose body was not in Egypt. The museum has agreed to return him to Egypt, but before then the mummy and other art and artifacts from his reign will be on display from Saturday through Sept. 14.

Among the other holdings is a delicately carved garnet head of Berenice, a distant grandmother of Cleopatra.

The Greek collection, which has expanded in the last five years, now includes a krater from 430 B.C. with scenes from the myth of Actaeon. Another recent purchase is a statue of a female, possibly Aphrodite. The museum also owns the Makron drinking cup, which bears one of the earliest studies of a female nude in Western art. There are extensive Maya and Inca works as well.

Every June 16, the Rosenbach participates in a worldwide celebration of Bloomsday, when James Joyce and his future wife, Nora Barnacle, walked the streets of Dublin in 1904. That journey was immortalized as Leopold Bloom's odyssey in ''Ulysses.''

The museum has reason to offer readings from parts of the masterpiece: it owns the original, handwritten 837-page manuscript. Several pages are displayed in the library, which occupies two elegant Federal-style houses. A. S. W. Rosenbach, a rare book dealer and the museum's co-founder, lived with his brother Philip in one of the houses.

Joyce published his work in 1922. But, needing money, he sold the manuscript, and Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach bought it at auction in 1924 for $1,975. It was a pittance compared with the $72,000 he had spent for several Joseph Conrad works, and Joyce was so upset by the low price that he offered to buy the manuscript back.

Fortunately for Philadelphia, Dr. Rosenbach was eager to keep it. He and his brother, who bought and sold decorative objects, had opened the Rosenbach Company in 1903. Dr. Rosenbach had already developed a reputation as a collector and dealer.

A passionate buyer whose acquisitions found their way to several major libraries, he built up a personal collection that included Lewis Carroll's own copy of an 1865 edition of ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' and several sketches by Sir John Tenniel. He also bought the first published work by an African-American: the slave Phillis Wheatley's 1773 ''Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral''; the handwritten edition of Dickens's ''The Pickwick Papers'' and handwritten notes and an outline for Bram Stoker's vampire novel ''Dracula.'' This week, the newly renovated museum is opening an exhibition of drawings by the children's book author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who donated the collection.

I had known about the Sackler for years, but on my infrequent trips to Boston, I inevitably spent time instead at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.

So on a rainy Saturday afternoon, it was a treat to finally visit the Sackler, with its exotic collection of Chinese bronze and jade and Buddhist sculpture.

The museum, which is part of the Harvard University Art Museums complex, was originally meant to house the overflow of Asian, Islamic and ancient objects from the Fogg. Then in 1985, after Mr. Sackler put up the money for a new building to accommodate the collection, it was renamed in his honor. Since then, the collections have continued to grow. The holdings also include Greek, Roman, Indian, Korean and Islamic works.

The Chinese collection was largely the gift of Grenville L. Winthrop. Among its most highly prized objects is a 13th-century B.C. bronze-covered wine vessel with the head of a tiger and a pale jade ritual disc shot with veins of brown from the warring states period, the 5th to 3rd centuries B.C. It is thought to have been used for paying homage to the heavens.

The museum also contains an expanding collection of Korean works.

Some of the donors to the Sackler are as well known as the art. John Kenneth Galbraith, a professor emeritus of economics at Harvard and former ambassador to India, gave 95 Indian artworks to the museum, including ''An Encounter at a Well,'' from the Rajasthan school and painted in 1745.

On a weekend visit to Palm Beach, I asked my hosts for the name of the best local museum, and they immediately sent me to the Norton, a sprawling complex where the architectural style has a local flavor, but the collection, which was started by Ralph and Elizabeth Norton, is both diverse and sophisticated.

As the chairman of the Acme Steel Company in Chicago, Mr. Norton accumulated a fortune that the he and his wife used to acquire works that appealed to their ''reasonably catholic'' tastes, as Mr. Norton once described the origins of the collection.

After the couple retired to Palm Beach in 1939, they created the museum as a home for the art, which was mostly focused on 19th- and 20th-century European and American pieces that ''gave us aesthetic satisfaction,'' Mr. Norton once said.

Though the museum does have pre-1870 European works, the Nortons' collection of European painting after 1870 is widely regarded as the highlight of the painting holdings; these include Cézanne's ''Portrait of Alfred Hauge,'' Boudin's ''Beach Scene at Trouville,'' Gris's ''Le Journal'' and Lipchitz's ''Rescue II.''

In the last decade, wealthy Palm Beach denizens have poured $60 million into the museum. Today, it also owns a substantial collection of American paintings from the corresponding European period, including Hopper's haunting ''August in the City'' and Prendergast's airy ''Bridge and Steps, Venice.''

It is now building a more modern collection, with works like Duane Hanson's sculputure, ''Young Workman.'' It has benefited as well from donations like the Baroness Jeane von Oppenheim's 650 photographs.

Last month, the Norton grew strikingly larger when it opened a new wing that expanded its galleries 75 percent. The original space, with an indoor courtyard and fountain, has a traditional feel, while the wing is far more modern. Fourteen galleries ensure ample room to show work from the more modern collections, as well as the museum's highly prized Chinese bronzes and jades.